Best Encapsulation:
Bas de Bakker
Pica, Centre for Library Automation
Statenweg 154 B (home address)
3039 JN Rotterdam
The Netherlands
Judges' comments:
To build:
make bas1
To use:
If lpr on your system can print PostScript:
./bas1 | gunzip | lpr
else, while in X Window System,
./bas1 | gunzip | gv -
or:
./bas1 | gunzip | gs -sDEVICE=pgmraw -sOutputFile='|xv -' -
The output is supposed to be a 3D maze, but it is somewhat more
than that. If you've seen any of the Maurits Escher's works,
you'll know what we're talking about.
When trying to run the program with command line arguments, be generous.
Selected Author's Comments:
BEMAZING
========
"You're in a twisty little maze of beams, all different."
Bemazing is "amazing" taken one step (letter) further. Bemazing
creates a 3D maze of beams. Try to go from the entrance (the
unfinished beam in one corner) to the exit (the unfinished beam in the
opposite corner) or vice versa.
For maximum portability, Bemazing is not tied to any window system,
but creates postscript. The picture it makes will fit on either A4 or
letter size paper.
In addition, because postscript is rather verbose, Bemazing creates
the postscript in gzip format, in order to save precious bits on your
hard disk for the latest version of GNU Emacs (after all, you wouldn't
want to use an editor without a psychoanalyze-pinhead function, now
would you). Again for maximum portability, Bemazing will take special
care that the binary output will not contain any newline or return
characters that may get weird treatment on systems that do not use the
One True Line Separator.
NOTES
=====
Be sure to view the source with something that can display characters
\240-\377. Use LESSCHARSET=latin1, M-x standard-display-european in
GNU Emacs etc. The source does not use characters in the range
\200-\237 (we are not an unnamed word processor that tends to create
HTML containing these control characters).
Because this is not the obfuscated postscript contest, the postscript
does not contain any "for", "if" or other control structures. All the
logic is in the C code. There are only a few straightforward "def"s,
because otherwise the output would become much larger.
Try running Bemazing with command line arguments and see what
happens. (But note that the program only guarantees that there
actually is a route from entrance to exit if you run it without
command line arguments.)